19h ago

Question about traffic using Cloudflare tunnel

Let's say I setup some subdomains and then point them to my home server via Cloudflare tunnel.

If I use one of those subdomains from my personal PC on the same network as my home server, to watch a movie for example, is all of that traffic going out to the internet and then back? Or does all the traffic stay internal once the connection has been made?

20 comments

I would assume yes, it goes out to cloudflare and back in. You want to setup an internal DNS server on your network, and resolve your servers address to its local one. That way when your outside your network, you use the tunnel, and inside it goes direct.
yes, its also called hairpinning. to avoid this you can use a local dns resolver.
- Cloudflare tunnel likely terminates TLS on the edge. So if you bypass it, you don't have HTTPS. Not a problem locally, but then destroys the portability of the URL (because at home you need http and outside you need https). Might as well use different hosts then.
  
  You can use caddy to get internal https via cloudflare API, and no traffic needs to go through a cloudflare tunnel for that.
  
  what if I use a separate proxy service locally with a cert and the same domain?
Should all be local after the connection is made, as long as nothing is wonky with your setup.
Locally you should resolve that DNS to your local server though, not via cloudflare.
- I dont know that that is true. With cloudflare tunnels, their server.x.y.z will resolve to a cloudlfare IP address, which then tunnels it to their server? The traffic has to hit the cloudflare server, it can't short circuit that connection? Am I missing something?
  
  Depends on the server obviously, but most will pass off their local once the initial handshake is made.
  Once that is done, DNS isnt relevant anymore.
  Edit: This is especially true for media (movies, TV) servers.

20 comments